These essays, written in the course of half a century of research and thought on German and Jewish history, deal with the uniqueness of a phenomenon in its historical and philosophical context. Applying the "classical" empirical tools to this unprecedented historical chapter, Kulka strives to incorporate it into the continuum of Jewish and universal history. At the same time he endeavors to fathom the meaning of the ideologically motivated mass murder and incalculable suffering. The author presents a multifaceted, integrative history, encompassing the German society, its attitudes toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime; as well as the Jewish society, its self-perception and its leadership.

This volume provides an indispensable resource for anyone studying the Holocaust. The reference entries are enhanced by documents and other tools that make this volume a vital contribution to Holocaust research. This volume showcases a detailed look at the multifaceted attempts by Germany's Nazi regime, together with its collaborators, to annihilate the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. Several introductory essays, along with a rich chronology, reference entries, primary documents, images, and a bibliography provide crucial information that readers will need in order to try to understand the Holocaust while undertaking research on that horrible event. This text looks not only at the history of the Holocaust, but also at examples of resistance (through armed violence, attempts at rescue, or the very act of survival itself); literary and cultural expressions that have attempted to deal with the Holocaust; the social and psychological implications of the Holocaust for today; and how historians and others have attempted to do justice to the memory of those killed and seek insight into why the Holocaust happened in the first place. Comprehensively examines all angles of the Holocaust within one easily readable volume written by experts Includes primary documents, with appropriate introductions, to set the historical and contemporary contexts for the entries Contains useful chronologies of the events surrounding the Holocaust Provides a number of contextualizing essays on various facets of the Holocaust, which precede the reference entries themselves

From twins torn away from their family and separated, to a girl shut in a basement, maltreated and malnourished, the world of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust becomes painfully clear in this volume. Psychiatrist Bluglass presents interviews with 15 adults who avoided execution in their childhoods thanks to being hidden by Christians, all of whom have since developed remarkably positive lives. All are stable, healthy, intelligent, and share a surprising sense of humor. Together, they show a profound ability to recover and thrive--an unexpected resilience. That their adjustment with such positive outcomes was possible after such harsh childhood experiences challenges a popular perception that inevitable physical and psychological damage ensues such adversity. Their stories offer new optimism, hope and grounds for research that may help traumatized children of today, and of the future, become more resilient. The book's core consists of these remarkable survivors' narratives, told in their own words. Also included are childhood and current pictures of each survivor, a list naming their rescuers (people who hid them), and a detailed bibliography.

Thousands of young Jews were orphaned by the Nazi genocide in the German-occupied Soviet Union and struggled for survival on their own. This book weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs produced in the former Soviet Union to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews, born after the foundation of the USSR, experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it in a context of social change following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The 1930s, a period when the notion interethnic solidarity and social equality were promoted and a partly lived reality, were formative for a cohort of young Jews. Soviet policies of the time established a powerful framework for the ways in which survivors of the genocide understood, survived, and represent their experience of violence and displacement. The book demonstrates that the young Soviet Jews' struggle for survival, and its memory, was shaped by interethnic relationships within the occupied society, German annihilation policy, and Soviet efforts to construct a patriotic unity of the Soviet population. Age and gender were crucial factors for experiencing, surviving, and remembering the Nazi genocide in Soviet territories, an element that Anika Walke emphasizes by investigating the individual and collective efforts to save peoples' lives, in hiding places and partisan formations, and how these efforts were subsequently erased in the construction of the Soviet war portrayal. Pioneers and Partisans demonstrates how the Holocaust unfolded in the German-occupied Soviet territories and how Soviet citizens responded to it. The book does this work through oral histories of atrocities and survival during the German occupation in Minsk and a number of small towns in Eastern Belorussia such as Shchedrin, Slavnoe, Zhlobin, and Shklov. Following particular individuals' stories, framed within the broader historical and cultural context, this book tells of repeated transformations of identity, from Soviet citizen in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.

What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using eye witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, this text reveals local policemen as hands on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbours from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murderers. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.

The memoir of Helen Weinberg depicts the plight of a young woman who hailed from Kremenitz, Poland. Separated from her family during World War Two, she was imprisoned, beaten, starved and tortured. This story is told using her own words from stories, essays and poetry translated from Yiddish and Polish, and serve as a guide through the different periods of her life. The pen and paper were her catharsis for the emotional torture she endured and provide a window into her soul. PRAISE FOR WHITE ANGEL "This book is a wonderful tribute to the multifaceted life of an extraordinary grandmother. Written by P'nina Seplowitz with great respect and much love, it traces the story of a woman who was exposed to the most horrific manifestations of human cruelty and who emerged with powerful strength to create a new world, who responded to the assault of death with an outpouring of life. The book is warm, touching and beautifully written; it will inspire its readers, young and not so young alike." - RABBI JACOB J. SCHACTER, Yeshiva University "White Angel is a thought provoking work of Holocaust literature. Helen Weinberg's remarkable story elicits the sorrowful burden of a broken nation and the glimmer of hope that existed with the establishment of the State of Israel. White Angel is an essential staple for any home or school." - RABBI DOV LIPMAN, Member Israeli Knesset "P'nina Seplowitz does a terrific job of telling an inspirational, yet tragic story, through the eyes of her heroic grandmother. This book is a must read for all those looking to be inspired by the strength of the human spirit." - RABBI STEVEN BURG, Simon Wiesenthal Center

Offers a comprehensive treatment of Holocaust education, blending introductory material, broad perspectives and practical teaching case studies. This work shows how and why pupils should learn about the Holocaust.>

The Holocaust continues to be a defining event for understanding not only the course of history during the 20th century but the course of human events in general. Perhaps the most contentious issue is that of how the Holocaust continues to be understood, explained, and appropriated. The chapters focus on questions arising from the Holocaust and that have to do with the American understandings of the interrelated web of history, religion, and meaning. In addition, the contributors, from a variety of disciplines, express views that range across several dimensions of receptivity and both support and challenge other views of how the Holocaust should be commemorated and/or historically situated.

The chapters included in this volume demonstrate that the ongoing rethinking and integrating of memories and questions from and on the Holocaust result in ever-new ethical orientations and demands that continue to affect religious praxis and the work of historians. They deal both explicitly and implicitly with how the Holocaust has been understood or misunderstood. The contributors write from across the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, theology, history, aesthetics, and political science and raise important ethical issues while providing fresh perspectives from both established and emerging scholars. This unique, cross-disciplinary approach is an essential addition to the literature on the Holocaust.

During the 1990s and early 2000s in Europe, more than fifty historical commissions were created to confront, discuss, and document the genocide of the Holocaust and to address some of its unresolved injustices.Amending the Past offers the first in-depth account of these commissions, examining the complexities of reckoning with past atrocities and large-scale human rights violations. Alexander Karn analyzes more than a dozen Holocaust commissions-in Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, and elsewhere- in a comparative framework, situating each in the context of past and present politics, to evaluate their potential for promoting justice and their capacity for bringing the perspectives of rival groups more closely together. Karn also evaluates the media coverage these commissions received and probes their public reception from multiple angles. Arguing that historical commissions have been underused as a tool for conflict management, Karn develops a program for historical mediation and moral reparation that can deepen democratic commitment and strengthen human rights in both transitional regimes and existing liberal states.

Shaping the minds of the future generation was pivotal to the Nazi regime in order to ensure the continuing success of the Third Reich. Through the curriculum, the elite schools and youth groups, the Third Reich waged a war for the minds of the young. Hitler understood the importance of education in creating self-identity, inculcating national pride, promoting 'racial purity' and building loyalty. Education in Nazi Germany examines how Nazism took shape in the classroom via school textbook policy, physical education and lessons on Nationalist Socialist heroes and anti-Semitism. Offering a compelling new analysis of Nazi educational policy, this book brings to the forefront an often-overlooked aspect of the Third Reich.

The questions posed by the Holocaust force faithful Christians to reexamine their own identities and loyalties in fundamental ways and to recognize the necessity of excising the Church's historic anti-Jewish rhetoric from its confessional core. This volume proposes a new framework of meaning for Christians who want to remain both faithful and critical about a world capable of supporting such evil. The author has rooted his critical perspective in the midrashic framework of Jewish hermeneutics, which requires Christians to come to terms with the significant other in their confessional lives. By bringing biblical texts and the history of the Holocaust face to face, this volume aims at helping Jews and Christians understand their own traditions and one another's.

What form does the dialogue about the family during the Nazi period take in the families of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and of Nazi perpertrators and accomplices? What impact does the past of the first generation, and their own way of dealing with it, have on the lives of their descendants? What are the structural differences between the dialogue about the Holocaust in families of perpetrators and those of the victims? This text examines these questions on the basis of selected case studies. It presents five families of survivors from Germany and Israel whose experiences of persecution and family histories after the liberation differ greatly. Two case studies of non-Jewish German families whose grandparents' generation are suspected of having perpretrated Nazi crimes illustrate the mechanisms operating in these families - those of passing the guilt on to the victims and creating the myth of being victims themselves - and give a sense of the psychological consequences these mechanisms have for the generations of their children and grandchildren.

My Hometown Concentration Camp tells the story of the young Bernard Offen's endurance and survival of the Krakow Ghetto and five concentration camps, including Plaszow and Auschwitz-Birkenau, until his liberation near Dachau by American troops in 1945. The author tells of his experiences in the ghetto and camps and how he set out, after the war, in search of his brothers, eventually finding them in Italy with the Polish Army. Having returned to the United States, Bernard Offen was drafted into the US Army to serve in the Korean War. After the war he founded his own business and had a family, both helping to restore a sense of normality to his life. This was the start of his own unique process of healing that led, ultimately, to his retirement and decision to dedicate his life to educating audiences around the world about his experiences during the Holocaust. Bernard Offen's story recounts his one-man journey across America, Europe, Israel and back to his native Poland, and his development as a filmmaker, educator and healer. My Hometown Concentration Camp will touch readers through the strength of the author's determination to attempt to confront and conquer the traumatic experiences he witnessed as a young man."